Want to Help the Environment? Eat Insects.

A group of experts endorse bugs as a nutritious and sustainable food source.
by Josie Glausiusz
From the May 2008 issue Discover Magazine; published online May 7, 2008

David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in
its underside, and flips off its head. “Smell the meat,” he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people
gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters,
they murmur appreciatively as they scoop out and swallow the grayish, slightly greasy insect flesh.“Perfumey, tastes like salty apples,” one says. “Like a scented candle blended with
an artichoke,” another adds.

The giant water bug, or Lethocerus indicus, a three-inch-long South Asian insect
that looks uncannily like a local cockroach, is just one of the items on the menu of this bug-eating bacchanal. The
Gastronauts’ meal may seem more like a reality TV stunt than a radical environmental strategy, but Gracer is on a
serious mission to shake up how we all think about our food supply. Gracer, a self-described “geeky poet/nature
boy” who teaches composition at a community college in Providence, Rhode Island, has made it his duty to persuade
ordinary Americans to eat insects.

Outside the United States, though, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, insect gathering is
becoming commercialized. And rural villagers in southern Africa harvest caterpillars from the local mopane trees.
Traditionally, mopane caterpillars have been an important source of protein for the villagers, but more recently
they have also been packaged and sold as a regional delicacy.

In fact, at least 1,400 species of insects are eaten around the world, and the
practice dates back thousands of years. However, even commercially distributed species such as the mopane
caterpillar are harvested from wild insect populations, mGracer wants people to move away from getting their
protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative
impact on the environment, regardless of whether the animals belong to subsistence farmers in developing countries
or a Western industrial conglomerate (see “Warning: Contains Pork By-Products,” page 40).

A United Nations report released in 2006 calls the livestock sector “one
of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every
scale from local to global.” The report notes that, among other adverse impacts, livestock production is
responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. (That’s more than what is produced by transportation
worldwide.) And the problem is only going to grow, with global production of meat reaching 465 million tons by
2050, double the amount produced in 2000.

“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If
you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.”
Insects, he claims, are nutritious. Although they typically contain less protein by weight than beef or chicken—100
grams of giant water bugs or small grasshoppers, for example, have about 20 grams of protein, compared with 27
grams in the same amount of lean ground beef—they do have other benefits. For instance, grasshoppers contain just
one-third of the fat found in beef, and water bugs offer almost four times as much iron. A 100-gram portion of the
cooked caterpillar Usata terpsichore has about 28 grams of protein. In their dried form, as they are commonly sold
in Africa, insects such as grasshoppers may contain up to 60 percent protein.

Raising insects has a low impact on the environment. They require little water,
perhaps because they obtain much of their moisture from their food. It takes 869 gallons of water to produce a
third of a pound of beef, about enough for a large hamburger. By contrast, to supply water to a quarter pound of
crickets, Gracer simply places- a moist paper towel at the bottom of their tank and refreshes it weekly. Insects,
he says, also need less food and space than vertebrate sources of protein and therefore could replace or supplement
food resources that may become scarce in the future, such as fish stocks, which a recent study indicates may
collapse by 2048.

Founded in 2005, Gracer’s company, a one-man operation called Sunrise Land Shrimp,
educates people about insect eating, or entomophagy. On a roughly monthly basis, Gracer will visit a high school or
give a public lecture, and he recently appeared on The Colbert Report (video). Not long ago he traveled to Thailand
to attend a United Nations workshop on entomophagy. “I would love to counteract the portrayal of entomophagy that
we see on Fear Factor and Survivor,” he says. “It’s my interest to bring it out of the zone of freakdom.” But even
Sunrise Land Shrimp doesn’t sell insects—yet. In the United States insects are generally available only as novelty
foods, such as the salt-and-vinegar-flavored crickets sold by Hotlix, a California company that specializes in
insect-based candies.

Outside the United States, though, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, insect gathering is
becoming commercialized. And rural villagers in southern Africa harvest caterpillars from the local mopane trees.
Traditionally, mopane caterpillars have been an important source of protein for the villagers, but more recently
they have also been packaged and sold as a regional delicacy.

In fact, at least 1,400 species of insects are eaten around the world, and the
practice dates back thousands of years. However, even commercially distributed species such as the mopane
caterpillar are harvested from wild insect populations, meaning that they are subject to year-to-year fluctuations
and problems of overharvesting. What is needed to stabilize the insect food supply is the development of farms.
“I’ve been working for a long time on trying to convince people that farming insects for the production of animal
protein and other materials might be a good idea,” says Robert Kok, chairman of the department of bioresource
engineering at McGill University, near Montreal. “Even if they didn’t want to eat them ‘whole hog,’ so to say, it
would be possible to extract the protein and oil from them and then manufacture food products from those
components,” Kok adds.

William White of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research
Service in Houma, Louisiana, is skeptical that this will ever come to pass in the United States, where food tends
to be overabundant rather than scarce, at least among those above the poverty line. “I don’t believe that we’ve
reached the level of scarcity in our food supply, at least in Western societies, where people would be willing to
incorporate insects at any level in their diet,” White says. “Certainly in the United States, the [response to]
insects almost borders on a phobia.” As Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and the author
of What to Eat, puts it, “I think people would have to be desperate for food to make insects a principal part of
their diet.” There are other obstacles too: Some insects, such as sea shrimp, cause food allergies; others
sequester toxins from plants or may harbor pesticide residues.

Even if we don’t all switch to Bug Burgers, Gracer and his insects are helping to
change our habit of making knee-jerk decisions about what we should and shouldn’t be eating. According to the
latest figures from the United Nations, 854 million people around the world went hungry in 2003. Really thinking
about our food choices could be the first step toward feeding our planet’s ever-growing population in a sustainable
manner.

Gracer continues to spend much of his spare time speaking at museums and schools
about the benefits and joys of bug eating. In the long term, though, he has grander plans: He would like to import
edible insects such as the popular mopane caterpillars or set up a commercial operation selling insects already
available here, such as spicy Mexican grasshoppers, or chapulines. He knows his mission is not an easy one; for one
thing, there is the small matter of funding. “If I did this for a living, my family and I would be eating bugs all
the time,” he says.